


Advanced Beginner Knots

by jeffwik (Portioncontrol)



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: But then i was reminded, Canon Divergent, F/M, Intro to Knots, Potentially bad cosmopolitans, What is Kahlua, actually i outlined this like three years ago and forgot about it, also the community fanfic discord holiday prompt, anyway whatever, partially inspired by the google image results for Alison Brie Get Hard, season 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-03
Updated: 2020-12-03
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:33:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27862362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Portioncontrol/pseuds/jeffwik
Summary: In the aftermath of “Intro to Knots” Jeff and Annie hook up.
Relationships: Annie Edison/Jeff Winger, little smidge of other canon relationships
Comments: 8
Kudos: 69
Collections: Community Discord Winter Holiday Collection





	Advanced Beginner Knots

December, 2013. Their senior year at Greendale, the group convened at Jeff's apartment for a party and gift exchange. The event spiralled wildly out of control but in the end there were kittens, and that made it all okay somehow. The details were already getting hazy. He was drunker than he usually got, but it was his house, so he wasn't driving anywhere.

Kittens were great. Jeff was never going to deny that kittens were great, ditto puppies. But kittens were a sometimes treat, inasmuch as kittens implied kitty litter and all its related subjects. Plus if he had a cat he'd have to feed it, and put up with its mewling demands for dinner starting an hour before actual dinner time, and there'd be hair on everything.

So no, Jeff didn't try to adopt a kitten when the dean brought them over. He cooed over them same as everybody else; he was only human. But that was as far as it went, and when Abed and Chang and the dean all went back to the dean's apartment for more kitten-related fun, Jeff felt no desire to join them. God only knew what the three of them would get up to without adult supervision, but it wasn't his problem.

They had started the party early, to accommodate Shirley's schedule, but now things were winding down. Cornwallis had been untied, plied with a drink, and allowed to slink off muttering. Shirley had already left, because she had three kids she needed to feed dinner. Chang and Abed and the dean had all drifted next door. Troy and Britta had said their goodbyes around the time the kitten brigade had rolled out, and now their coats were on and they were slowly drifting to the exit, making noises about going back to someone's place and ordering pizza. 

Jeff had assumed Annie would be leaving with them, but she didn't have her coat on. He watched her have a quick, whispered conversation with Britta. Both of them glanced his way and he quickly turned his head to admire his own Christmas tree.

A few seconds later Annie was sitting on the sofa next to him. "As you know I drove here separately," she began.

"Yeah?" Jeff had known that, actually. How had he known that? She'd arrived first and alone, that was it. Kind of obvious. She'd shown up early for some last-minute prep, not as early as he would have liked, but—

"And, well, I've had a bit too much to drink, I think." Annie smiled in a self-deprecating sort of way. "I guess I'm still getting used to being old enough. Which I am. Old enough for anything. So--"

"You want me to call you a cab?" Jeff guessed.

Annie shook her head no. "Troy and Britta are going to give me a ride home, that's not the problem. The problem is, it means my car will be in your building's lot overnight. Is that okay?"

Jeff was nonplussed. This was a pretty minor ask. "Yeah, sure. I mean, why not? I guess there's a slim chance your car could be towed but if that happens I'll rake them over the coals, tell them you're my guest."

"Oh, good." Annie sounded relieved, like this was something she'd been fretting about for a week or more.

"Of course tomorrow's a plough day," he mused, not thinking too hard about what he was saying. "You'll need to have your car out of there by seven."

She nodded tightly, like she'd already been aware of this. "I'll get a cab back over here in the morning. Troy won't be able to drive me."

"That's silly, I can just..." Jeff blinked, as the situation dawned on him. "You little holiday elf, you're trying to guilt me into inviting you to sleep on the couch."

"What? No!" Annie said with an insincerity so self-evident it may have wrapped back around to being genuine.

"It's okay," Jeff told her. The situation amused him more than anything else. This was _Annie_ ; she only needed to ask. "I insist you share my bed. Take my bed. My couch. No, the bed, you take the bed, I'll sleep on the couch." He yawned, suddenly aware that he was a bit more intoxicated than he'd allowed himself to be in Annie's presence in years. A glass of cold water would help.

As he rose and walked to the kitchen, he saw Annie make some kind of surreptitious hand gesture to Troy and Britta. He'd definitely been set up, for whatever that was worth. Probably Annie knew something he didn't as regards Troy and Britta's plans for the evening, and had decided it would be better to make herself scarce.

The glass of water made him feel a little more sober, and so did standing up and walking. Mostly he'd just been drowsy, he decided. Then Troy and Britta were leaving for real, after talking about it for twenty minutes.

"Good-night, you big dork," Britta said as Troy hugged him good-bye (again). "Don't do anything I wouldn't do, okay?"

"Sure," he replied. "No voting Republican, admitting my mistakes, or declining drinks from strange men."

She made a face at him, and then they were gone.

Jeff would have stood there, alone in his silent apartment, striking a moody pose for several minutes, except of course he wasn't alone.

"I think that went well," Annie said as she came out of the kitchen carrying his trash can. She started picking up wrapping paper, napkins, and other party detritus with an enthusiasm that was more than a little fun to watch. It also seemed to undercut her supposed reason for being there still, that she was too drunk to drive.

"Were we at the same party?" Jeff smiled, to see her busying herself with the trash like it was her apartment to clean, her trash to gather, her party to have thrown. "Because the one I was at featured multiple felonies."

She looked up and pointedly rolled her eyes, then went back to stuffing wrapping paper into the trash can. "All's well that ends well. The kittens were cute."

"The kittens were absolutely..." Jeff had a picture of Annie holding up a kitten on his phone, making a face for him that undeniably beat the kitten for adorableness. "Very cute."

"And we succeeded at the goal of getting us all passing grades," she continued. "No charges were filed and nobody had to..."

Jeff had sat back down on the sofa, the better to enjoy watching Annie work. When she trailed off, he cleared his throat. "Hmm?"

"He called me a type-A Lolita, did you hear that?"

"Who, Cornwallis? He's a dick."

"Yeah!" Annie punctuated her agreement by looking up at him again, eyes shining as she nodded. "He is." After a pause she returned to her trash collection, but now it was slightly more pensive.

Under other circumstances Jeff would have just let it go, but it was just the two of them there. "What's up?"

Annie set the trash can down. She'd already gathered up almost all the wrapping paper, anyway. "I just...I don't want you to think I..." She sat down on the sofa next to him, hands folded primly, her expression thoughtful.

He was about to ask her 'what' again when she continued. "You remember the other day we all got in a hot air balloon and we got lost in the woods and we got high off of berries, which...I don't know how that happened, it doesn't make much sense when I say it out loud...but anyway, afterwards the dean made us talk with puppets and we all confessed things? And I said I let Professor Cornwallis give me a foot massage?"

"...Yeah."

"He didn't give me a foot massage. I don't know why I said that. I made it up. I don't know why."

"Annie," Jeff said, as prelude to something like _you don't need to defend yourself against me thinking poorly of you_ but she was shaking her head.

"And then we all just kind of agreed to pretend it had never happened, but maybe it kind of affected how we treated Professor Cornwallis today, and he's a jerk, but he didn't molest me."

"To tell you the truth, I've never dated a woman with kids long enough to be invited to a soccer game." Jeff shrugged. "I think we were all making stuff up."

"I guess." She sounded a little uncertain, so he reached over and squeezed her arm.

"It's okay. Like you said, we all agreed to pretend it never happened. Like glee club."

She smiled at that. "You know, you never did teach me how to celebrate Christmas."

He grinned back. "Not enough dancing."

"Do you think this..." She paused to consider the best phrasing. "Holiday episode of our lives... went more or less smoothly than the time we joined the glee club?"

"Oh, this was definitely better," Jeff said. "Nobody got arrested and Britta didn't sing."

"Well, okay then!" She looked very pleased. "See? This was a successful party we threw."

"Yeah. Yeah..." Jeff reached for his drink to take a sip, but it was empty. "I'm sorry about what I said before, about playing house."

"That's fine, I knew you didn't mean it."

"I didn't. And I didn't mind you coming in and decorating."

"You liked it."

"Okay, yes." Jeff was still smiling. "I liked you coming in and decorating like you were marking territory."

"I mean, otherwise we would have basically had the party in a hotel conference room." Annie gestured around Jeff's living room. It was an unfair characterization but he didn't feel like arguing. "You need a little Annie in here. To make a house a home."

"I guess I do," Jeff agreed.

Annie looked away then, a little embarrassed. She stood and crossed to the big cabinet where he kept his liquor. "There's still like half a pitcher of Britta's cosmos sitting here. You want some?" She poured herself a glass over ice.

"You haven't had enough?" Jeff asked as he watched her.

Annie stuck her tongue out at him, then turned back to the drinks. "I had one cosmo like three hours ago. I'm fine! I mean," she added quickly, "obviously I can't drive but that's just because I would rather err on the side of caution. So do you want the rest of this or should I pour it out? I can get you another scotch if you want while I'm standing here. Something peaty. I know what you like. Scotch. Scotch whiskey. Bourbon?"

Jeff hadn't stopped smiling. "Are you trying to get me drunk?" he asked as he stood up.

Annie almost dropped her glass. "What? No! No. I mean, I'm just trying to, I... you..." She set the cosmo down on the sideboard and turned to him, her arms raised almost in a defensive posture. 

"Tell you what," she said as he approached her. Her face was turning red. She was flustered, her arms fluttering around her, hands flapping in that way she did when she was really anxious. Evidently she'd just expended her last reserves of cool. It had taken all she had to get to this point; she could go no further without assistance. "I can call a cab, if you want, I can, I just, it was a silly thought, you know, and I'm sorry, I'll just--"

She broke off when Jeff grabbed her and scooped her up and kissed her. Annie pressed herself into him, wrapping her arms around his torso like she was clinging to flotsam amidst a shipwreck.

* * *

As they collapsed onto the couch together, clutching one another, part of Jeff was insensate, consumed by the event, but part of him was standing a step back, seeing the scene as if from outside, almost. In that moment he recalled just how much he'd fantasized about Annie Edison in the last year or so. 

Usually the fantasies were straight-up raunchy pornography, no plot, no attempt at narrative. Just him and Annie alone. Annie, her clothes falling off her. Annie, falling into him. Annie, braced against the study table, or Jeff's kitchen counter, or the sofa in the apartment she shared with Troy and Abed. Just Annie, nude and eager and ready, wherever he happened to be while he entertained the fantasy.

Occasionally the fantasy was a little more elaborate. Some massive event had happened that pushed them together and made it okay. Maybe they were in a _Mad Max_ -style post-apocalyptic Greendale, the two of them together against the raiders and mutants. Maybe it was a timeline where he was still a lawyer, he'd never been to Greendale, and they met because she was a widow, he was handling her late husband's estate, he suspected she was a murderer but he didn't care. Maybe all of Greendale was somehow transformed into a _Dungeons & Dragons _ style fantasy milieu, and he was a brave human paladin and she an ethereally beautiful elf sorceress several hundred years his senior.

Maybe Annie'd already had some kind of breakdown or relapse and she was already ruined; there was nothing he could do that would hurt her any more. Maybe they were both lawyers, working on high-stakes financial fraud cases, long hours poring over depositions and records together. Or any of a half-dozen other different impossible things.

Very occasionally, Jeff's fantasy was cozy domesticity, with wedding rings and societal approval. Maybe a kid or two, even, and there was still plenty of pornographic raunchiness but it was within the context of a loving and mutually supportive partnership.

But this? This unexpected, inexplicable make out session on his sofa after a Christmas kidnapping-and-kittens party? This wasn't like any of that. This wasn't barely-pent floodgates bursting open, but soft rain on the parched Oklahoma dust bowl. Not animalistic lust, empty bodies mechanically slapping skin. It was infused instead with an acute awareness that the body he was handling had Annie inside it, his favorite person. That the feelings that had sloshed around inside him for longer than he'd been willing to admit, even to himself, those feelings finally had an outlet and a purpose and it felt incredible. His teeth tingled, his toes twitched.

This was a closeness they'd denied themselves and were finally allowing themselves to enjoy. It wasn't steeped in guilt or self-hatred, it was just soft and intimate and real. Annie started laughing at one point, and rather than worry or stop Jeff started laughing too, and then they were rolling around on the sofa together, off the sofa onto the floor, bodies intertwined, shaking with joy and relief.

* * *

Abruptly Annie tugged herself free and rose to her feet. "Don't go anywhere," she tells him, grinning as broadly as he can feel himself grinning back. "I'll be right back." She grabbed her purse and dashed to the bathroom, leaving Jeff alone to catch his breath.

Jeff sprawled on the sofa and stared at the Christmas tree. Was this happening? Yes, he was forced to conclude that it was. Amazing.

Amazing, too, Jeff thought as the seconds ticked on, that he didn't feel any urge to cut and run, to escape before he could hurt her. There was a little kernel of anxiety there, yes. He could feel it. But it wasn't overpowering him or driving him to make choices that he intellectually knew were bad ones.

Maybe he'd had the exact correct amount to drink, and his inhibitions were lowered just enough that he'd impulsively kissed her but not so much that he fled screaming into the night. A deep breath, and...no. He just didn't feel that drunk. Excited, yes, his teeth were still tingling, but not drunk.

The cosmo Annie had poured but not drank was still sitting on the sideboard by the mostly emptied pitcher. Looking at it Jeff felt an urge to pour it out and make her something decent. Britta made terrible cosmos, he was pretty sure, even though she worked as a bartender.

He stood and ducked into his kitchen, to grab skim milk for White Russians, and when he returned, there was Annie.

"Whatcha doing?" Her tone was insouciant but her smile had turned a little bashful. Maybe she'd rethought things during her brief bathroom break. "You got milk?"

"You want a White Russian? I'm going to make a couple of White Russians," he told her. "You were standing there holding that awful-looking cosmo and I felt I needed to intervene."

"Oh, is that was that was? I was going to have a bad cocktail?" Her body language had shifted, tightened slightly. Her green dress was rumpled and hung more loosely off her than before, the belt undone. She'd skipped some of the buttons. Her hair was a little unkempt. "You need to save me from myself?"

"Hey, I know you make good choices. The best choices. Maybe the best choices anywhere, is what people say." He kept his tone light, hoping that the tension in her eyes would fade, that whatever had spooked her a little would pass before she decided to call that cab after all. "You want an appletini instead?"

"You don't have the apple stuff," she retorted.

"True." Jeff busied himself with the drinks, which meant turning away from her. "Yeah, I don't have enough demand for sour apple pucker to keep it stocked. Or I haven't in the past."

"'Who knows what the future holds?'" Annie said as if she were quoting something. He could hear in her voice a little bit of unwinding, a little loss of anxiety. "Is this a girl-drink, guy-drink kind of thing? Cosmos are way too _Sex and the City_ , appletinis are too sweet, you need a man's drink with milk and whatever Kahlua is?"

"It's a coffee liqueur."

"Yes, you're all sophisticated and you know what Kahlua is, we get it." He turned and saw her smile was shy, now. Her legs were pulled up under her on the couch, almost entirely hidden by her skirt. "That's why you like scotch. Because nothing says sophisticated man of the world like scotch. Never mind that it's basically dirt flavor. That's the selling point, it tastes like mud--"

She broke off and lunged for him as he sat down next to her. He had a drink in each hand and they both spilled, but only a little, mostly onto Annie's dress. She made a satisfied yum noise as she climbed into his lap, got into his way as he tried to set the drinks down. Pressing herself into him, demanding kisses he was only too happy to supply.

Setting the drinks down seemed to take ages, not seconds. Finally his hands were free, and they immediately set to work holding her, which was their purpose in the world, he'd just then realized. She felt different, though. It took him a moment to realize what he was feeling.

Annie felt him feeling her and wriggled in his grasp, which was not at all unpleasant. "I can explain," she whispered softly, punctuating the remark by nipping at his earlobe.

"Wha..." That was all he could get out before he was rendered speechless by her sliding her dress up and off, still in his lap. Beneath it she was wearing... "Wha," Jeff said again, a little more insistently.

She smiled shyly. "You like? A while back, like, a year ago maybe, some guy at the bar where Britta works gave her a gift card to the lingerie boutique at the mall," Annie said, as if Jeff cared even slightly about that. "And she was like, ew, no thanks, never speak to me again, but she held onto the card and then she gave it to me because she thought maybe I would like to, you know, indulge male fantasy with performative girly-girl femme bullshit. Basically that. I forget how she phrased it."

"I have met Britta," Jeff assured her. He didn't want to be talking about Britta just then. He didn't want to be talking at all.

"Yeah. You get it." She seemed amused at the amount of attention he was paying her. Just then the apartment could have burned down around them and he wouldn't notice. The sheer fabric felt smooth under hands. He started to tug her, slightly, so her could start kissing her and never stop, but Annie shifted her weight a little, leaned away, signaled that she wasn't ready for that yet, and he relented.

"So eventually," she continued, her eyelids fluttering a little as she enjoyed his hands on her, "I was at the mall alone and I remembered I had the card in my purse, and I ended up buying this and it's been at the bottom of my underwear drawer ever since."

"What a thoughtful gift," he said, because he felt like he ought to say something. He couldn't just silently sit there and smile and pet her, could he? Not indefinitely.

"And then, you know, on a whim I tossed it into my purse, and...here we are." Annie shimmied in his lap in a way that it took him a second to process as _ta-da!_ "There's a pair of insanely high heels that go with it but they're in my closet at home," she continued, and she might have had more to say but by then Jeff felt he'd held out for as long as any man possibly could, and put her mouth and his to better use than conversation.

* * *

Later...it wasn't clear at first how much later, but later enough that they agreed they should get something to eat and so they relocated from his bedroom to the kitchen, him in boxers and her still wearing most of the lingerie, and the clock on the microwave said it had been four hours which seemed impossible...later they were raiding his fridge for leftover Chinese food to reheat and he pushed her about this so-called whim.

"You came to this party armed," he said, tugging at the sheer fabric of it. "Or are you claiming you keep this in your purse regularly, just in case you meet a stunningly sexy man and decide to seduce him?"

"You say that like it would never happen, but I see you almost every day," Annie pointed out between mouthfuls of spring roll. "Okay, yes. Is that what you want to hear? Yes. I brought the teddy on purpose. I cajoled you into hosting a holiday party on purpose. I convinced Abed to go along with it instead of doing _Die Hard_ in a restaurant, which is what he wanted. I drank one of Britta's cosmos and I pretended to top off like four times so you wouldn't know how much I'd had to drink, or not. And then I tricked you into inviting me to stay after the party."

"That last part was way more effort than you needed to go through," Jeff told her, smiling again. "You could have just said 'Jeff I am sleeping over' and I'd have sighed theatrically and found you sheets for the couch."

Annie sniffed, dismissing the objection. "Well, that would have had a whole different energy. I wanted the whole thing with Cornwallis to go a different way, A's for everybody, triumph, a celebratory kiss as we're caught up in the moment...This works fine, too, though." 

* * *

Later still, the food was long-eaten and they clung together in his bed. They'd showered and changed the sheets and they could have stood to change them again, but that wasn't important just then.

"I'm glad we did this," Jeff said, breaking a companionable and more than slightly drowsy silence. They lay together, her backside to his frontside, his arm thrown over her.

Annie didn't respond right away, and Jeff thought she'd fallen asleep, but then she let out a satisfied hum. "Me too. There weren't that many chances left."

"Hm?"

"In a few weeks you're going to graduate," Annie reminded him. "And then I'll graduate in the spring. We probably would have started to drift apart, without a study group."

"Not possible." Jeff tried to imagine his life without Annie in it. His mind rebelled.

"You don't think? I'm stuck with Troy and Abed, and Britta too now, maybe, I don't know, but Pierce didn't come to the party. And Shirley has so much to deal with. Kids, her sandwich shop, all of that. Maybe we would have just drifted out of each other's orbits."

"No." Jeff said it firmly but sleepily.

"We missed a lot of chances."

"Yeah, well." Jeff squeezed her tighter. Annie being in his bed felt more right than anything has in a long, long time.

"We didn't hook up when we did a couples costume for Halloween, and we didn't hook up on that ski weekend that wasn't. We were running out of chances, so, you should be glad I finally pulled the trigger and seduced you tonight. Now or never."

"It wasn't a real couples costume," Jeff protested. "You were the wrong kind of Ring girl."

Annie scoffed. Some of her hair got in his face and tickled his nose. He did not mind. "You think I didn't know what you meant? You wanted me to be your sexy little showgirl. I just needed to get you to admit it. It would have worked if Pierce hadn't screwed it all up."

Jeff grunted. "Yeah, probably... how many times did you try and fail to seduce me, exactly?"

"Oh, I don't know. I didn't keep count. There was the thing with the capes, and the time I texted you about how I was going to fuck you in the bio lab--"

"Pottymouthed minx," Jeff said with a half-hearted attempt at sounding scandalized.

"See, I can surprise you." She wiggled her hips smugly, a gesture that would have been unthinkable the day before.

"Anyway I remember it clearly. 'Screwed in the Biology room,' is what it was." Jeff tried to sound annoyed while still petting her hair with one hand (getting it away from his face in the bargain) and holding her tight with the other.

"Well, sometimes I chickened out, like when I didn't ask you to the Sadie Hawkins dance, and sometimes it seemed like it was going to work, like the ski weekend. I kind of just tried to make situations where it could happen, you know, I didn't want to force it. Sometimes I don't even know what happened, why it didn't work out. Like the glee club."

"I remember that."

"I know. Step one, sexy song and dance just for Jeff, step three, relationship. I didn't have a step two."

Jeff remembered the scene, the way Annie's eyes had shone. What had stopped him, then? A sense that he was taking advantage of her, maybe. The sexy-baby act had hit just the wrong way, fired up his insecurities, reminded him that she was young and deserved better.

But then a year later they were still...whatever they'd been before _this_. Maybe it was just chance, like they'd flipped a coin together dozens of times, and somehow it had come up tails every time until tonight. Maybe he'd needed that long to accept that she knew what she wanted.

Maybe it didn't matter because they were here, now. He squeezed her tight again, felt her press into him, and then he rolled her over so she was facing him, which was all the prompting she needed to start kissing him.

"Before I forget!" She pulled back suddenly. "What do you want to do for New Year's Eve?"

"What? We never do anything for New Year's Eve."

"Yeah, I know. I want to do something. Every year, I say, let's do a New Year's Eve party, and every year, you say no, and maybe this year I don't want to take no for an answer--"

"Annie--"

"Because _I am going to kiss you at midnight_ , so if you decide you're going to hole up alone in your apartment with the lights off watching old sitcoms on Netflix then you should know I _will_ break in--"

Jeff silenced her with a kiss. "Okay," he said a moment later. "Okay. But you know, Shirley won't be able to make it, probably. Who knows what Pierce will do. And if I throw another party you-know-who is going to hear about it and show up whether we invite him or not."

"You-know-who? Oh," Annie said, realizing. "The dean."

"Yeah. And kissing you with an audience of the dean would not work out."

"I'd have to compete with him to be the one kissing you at the stroke of midnight," Annie agreed thoughtfully. "I could keep him out of the way, tie him to a chair, but he'd probably interpret that the wrong way."

"Exactly."

"Of course my skin already feels kind of raw from rubbing against your stupid sexy stubble," she continued, touching her chin. "By the end of the month I might need bandages, or I could send the dean in as a pinch-kisser..."

"I can shave," Jeff said. "You want me to shave? I'll shave right now." He started to climb out of bed.

She stopped him, and sighed happily as she rubbed her face against his shoulder. "It's okay. I like your stubble."

"Good."

"I like other parts of you, too."

"Also good."

"We don't need to do a whole New Year's party. I mean, we never have."

Jeff considered. "The clock strikes, the ball drops, and there's be you and me, Britta and Troy, maybe Shirley and Andre... and then Abed, Chang, Pierce, the dean, all looking at each other and wondering _what if_..."

"Ha! Oh, did you know?" Annie sat up, pressing her palms into his chest for support. "Abed has a girlfriend. I think."

"What? Seriously?"

"I've never met her, at least I don't think so. But she's a real person and they've been going out on the sly for at least a few weeks, and her name is one of Phoebe, Monica, or Rachel. I know that because..." Annie shook her head. "Never mind how I know that."

Jeff pulled her back down, on top of him. "If we haven't met her yet Abed would probably try to sneak her in without us knowing. Stash her in the coat closet or something."

"Mmm." Annie moved to kiss him again. "Then at midnight he ducks into the closet... I could see him doing that. It's classic farce."

"Well, I think I speak for everyone when I say that we'd all prefer to have a quiet, intimate celebration, just the two of us, without any farce."

"Or drama."

"Or drama," Jeff agreed, and then they were done talking for a while.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Bethanyactually and Amrywiol and Raj_sound for all three offering helpful comments. Thanks to the Community Discord fanfic channel for having a holiday fic prompt that made me remember this old outline.


End file.
